FinTS

Financial Transaction Services, FinTS short, is a German standard for the operation of online banking. FinTS is a further development of online banking standards HBCI. The purpose of FinTS is to unify the connection between bank customers and the bank, especially in view of the multi-bank capability. Currently, the cooperative banks, savings banks, Commerzbank, the German bank, and several other banks FinTS support.

Technical Features

FinTS includes safety procedures with electronic signature (a smart card or self-generated RSA key disk) as well as the safety procedures PIN / TAN. FinTS sees itself as a modular system from the underlying FinTS protocol, security procedures, transactions and financial data formats. The various components are defined individually, in separate specification volumes. The use of specific transactions from the HBCI version 2.0.1 is not bound to the version of the specification under which the transaction was originally published. Thus, e.g. a transaction from HBCI 2.2 quite used under FinTS 3.0 further, provided that he himself, as well as a transported him from a foreign format is technically or legally still valid.

It is characterized in particular by the introduction of SECCOS HBCI signature card as a possible unified security medium. With this signature card can be a legally binding declaration be submitted in electronic commerce. In addition, the safety procedures are adapted to the current state of the art, such as an increase in the key length ( 1024 to 2048 bit) has been made. The current PIN / TAN extension was added as an alternative security procedures to HBCI in FinTS.

From a technical standpoint build FinTS messages which are transmitted over the Internet between banks and customers, since version 4.0 FinTS on the specified by the W3 Consortium XML language standard. Through the consistent use of XML signatures, XML schemas and XML namespaces facilitate integration with other payment systems.

History

In 2002, the development of HBCI as FinTS version 3.0 has been released. The FinTS 3.0 standard contains compared to the HBCI precursors in addition the security procedures PIN / TAN and the use of signature cards. Already under HBCI 2.2 " HBCI extension PIN / TAN" were part of the Institutes of DSGV association specific transactions under the name been developed and used. These transactions were then made ​​available to the institutions of the other organizations of the CCC for your own use. In version 3.0 FinTS this procedure was finally adopted as alternative security solution in the CCC -wide FinTS standard.

In 2004, Version 4.0 was introduced FinTS. In this version, all internal data structures were completely converted to XML and XML schema that uses HTTPS as the communication protocol and other new interfaces introduced ( eg WWW portals ).